friends protect people
by moriartsy
Summary: in which John is schizophrenic and Sherlock is a hallucination. inspired by a Tumblr post by 5pips.


_a/n: so i was on tumblr and i saw this post by 5pips:_

_**AU**__: John is a schizophrenic; Sherlock is his imaginary friend._

_i was intrigued enough to get off my lazy bum and write something. so here we have it._

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friends protect people:

a _sherlock_ fanfic

John was not at all happy about being in this place. Harry had told him he needed to get some help and checked him into this place, this hospital (it wasn't the kind of hospital John worked at, but he was too distracted to recall what kind of hospital it was). And he had laughed, because who was Harry to talk about needing help?, but he had stopped laughing after the people in this place started to talk to him. Or rather, _at_ him, as they didn't allow him to defend himself, wouldn't listen to the truth.

They told him that Sherlock wasn't real, that he had never been real. They said John had imagined him, he was a hallucination, a delusion (no, those were two different things, but John was too distracted to remember how or why). But John knew they were lying to him - he knew the man was for real, 100%.

John knew that the world's only consulting detective, his consulting detective, was alive, somewhere. He knew that the genius - and he _was_ a genius, no matter what they said - had faked his own death so that he could disintegrate Moriarty's web of criminals.

They told him that Moriarty really was just Jim From IT. But John knew he wasn't. John had tried to tell the people here that that was Moriarty's whole trick - getting people to believe he was normal, he was just another guy, an actor, innocent, faultless. They had refuted this claim, somehow, something about "paranoia" which was "to be expected" with "this kind of illness." (Illness? _John_ had the illness? What about bloody Moriarty?, _he_ was the madman in this situation.)

John knew that they were wrong about Moriarty. He knew that the bastard had tried to kill his best friend, Sherlock Holmes, and that Sherlock had outsmarted him with his genius by pretending to commit suicide.

They told him there was no way any real, flesh-and-blood, mortal man could survive a fall from such a height onto hard concrete. But John knew there was. (Although, he didn't know what it was. How _could_ someone survive that kind of fall? But he knew there had to be a way. Sherlock always had a way.)

A way in, a way out, a way through, a way around. It was all there, somewhere, in that great brain of his. Sherlock had always had a great brain; John's wasn't in as good of shape. (Or at least, that's what they told him. The doctors - _he_ was a doctor, but don't doctors make the worst patients? - told him that he was sick, that he had to come to this place to get better [That's why Harry sent him here, wasn't it? Christ, _why_ did Harry send him here?!].)

They told him that getting better meant letting go. Just _letting go_ of Moriarty and his criminal syndicate, and all the murders he'd committed, ignoring the blind woman and small child he had strapped to bombs, forgetting that he had strapped John himself to Semtex. Letting go of... of his best friend. _Letting go of Sherlock Holmes,_ the freak, the high-functioning sociopath, the genius, the world's only consulting detective.

John didn't want to let go. If that was what getting better was all about, he wanted to stay unwell. He didn't care what Harry or his parents or the damn doctors or the other patients said, he refused to heal himself if it meant abandoning the only man he truly cared about.

He'd been so alone for so long, even more so after coming home from Afghanistan. And then Sherlock came along. And now John had a friend. And now John wasn't so alone anymore. (That is, those things _were_ true, until Sherlock had left and John had been left in this godforsaken place. But Sherlock would come back and help him. He knew it.) And if he had to go back to being alone in order to get better, well, that was just too goddamn bad.

He didn't have any friends, he just had one. Sherlock. And Sherlock was the same; a loner. It just fit. _They_ fit, they worked so well together, even though they didn't know each other for a very long time; it was like friendship at first sight (John knew that wasn't the exact phrase, but the exact phrase scared him too much in this context.)

He wasn't going back to where he had been before Sherlock. He wasn't going back to that dark place. Sherlock was his only point of _light._

No. _No._ John didn't want to let go. He wouldn't allow them to try to "help" him. He simply wouldn't allow it.

Any moment now, John thought, Sherlock will come bursting through that door, with some elaborate plan to save John. He would bust in, look around a bit, make some quip about John's current living conditions, and then he would do whatever it took to get John out of this place. He could just look around for a moment and garner all the information he needed to break John out. He would break the rules, he would break the law. Whatever it took.

Because friends were supposed to protect people. And Sherlock was John's friend, his only friend; and John was the same to Sherlock. They helped each other, all the time, they complemented each other perfectly, they were the best of friends, and so Sherlock would simply _have_ to protect John. And no one would ever convince John that he was imaginary.

So... there.

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_"__If I go crazy then will you still call me Superman? If I'm alive and well will you be there holding my hand?"_

- 3 Doors Down,_ Kryptonite_

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_a/n: original post is here: /post/25068016522_


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